Cutting the cable / satellite - ideas?

[Phoenix]

I've just recently become completely fed up with the high price of DirecTV and have decided to move towards being one of those who have cut the cable so to speak. Never having researched this before, I would like to get ideas from anyone who has done this...

Looking at some forums, I'm seeing stuff like:

1. KODI / XBMC (kodi.tv)
2. PLEX (plex.tv)
3. Chromecast / Amazon Fire stick / ROKU? - I've had Chromecast for a while now but it always "freezes" during transmission. I've never gotten it to deliver a solid, steady broadcast of anything. (probably because it's Google ) (Fire Stick give you free ESPN...?)
4. A very large TB drive to "record" content on DVR-like software
5. DVR-like Software itself
6. HD antenna
7. Very long coax - it acts as an additional antenna...
8. apps - icefilms, let me watch this, movie 2k, SportsDevil?
9. Netflix / Amazon Prime

Any success stories out there that include any of these things or others?

 

[65fastback2plus2]

cut ours over 4 years ago now.

I have a good setup but here's how I would do it now with current stuff

1) Netflix
2) Hulu
3) SlingTV
4) Asus Android TV Box
5) Antenna

also, longer coax cables drop the voltage out of the signal and will cause signal issues. If you have to use a longer cable, you'll want to put a booster on it.

 

[CyberB0b]

This is what I am running:

HDHomerun hooked up to antenna
24/7 server and front end in the living room. It runs Ubuntu, and I have Kodi, mythTV, torrent client, and other stuff installed on it.
Raspberry Pi2 and FireTV sticks on every TV in the house. The RP2 has hardware MPEG2 decoding, which allows you to watch live TV through mythTV. The FireTV sticks run Netflix and Amazon Prime if you like.

 

[morasp]

I quit direct tv two years ago and don't miss it. We have a Tivo roamio that works with antenna. Our antenna channels are:

NBC
ABC
CBS
Fox
Ion
Ion life
Grit
Me TV
Antenna TV
CW
GetTV
Qubo
Three shopping channels
Three PBS channels
My TVQ
weather radar

The picture quality is better than Direct TV.

We also have Netflix, Hulu, and sling TV. I recently bought the amazon fire TV box for $50 by buying three months of sling in advance. I must say the fire is a very good box, fast, very good picture, and easy to use. Besides lots of apps it lets me listen to audio CDs that I've purchased in the past from amazon for free. Our total monthly bill including TiVo, Netflix, Hulu, and sling is $50 and it's hard to decide what to watch.

 

[PJTHEDOORS]

Ya, cable was too high, so we too cut it off. Now going with Sling TV. If I want to watch live sports (not on ESPN or TNT which I get on Sling TV), streaming sites are starting to (little by little) stream in better definition. I would watch NFL/NBA online anyways when games weren't on tv.